I've always had a thing for Etna. I already own this figure, the real one, but I still wanted to paint her myself. Since I like her so much, I should have waited till I was better with the airbrush, but alas, she was my first - which means I really had no idea what I was doing.
Since this was my first experience using the airbrush, I didn't try to do anything fancy with it. Or rather, I should say that I tried, but quickly decided to cover up my attempt with solid color instead. After a bit of practice, I added a highlight to the hair and wings (which can barely be seen) and did a gradient on the tail. I was too scared to attempt shading the skin (the skin being the most important part of a figure, IMO). But I did use the airbrush on the shoes, which are just two colors - but that's enough for me to have to mask, so just in case you haven't been paying attention, this is (was) my first masking. After the shoes I did the legs, which was my second masking, but my first where I really cared about getting it precise. So I taped them up, painted them, and left them on the desk for a week. When I got back to them, the tape was hard core stuck to the paint and I was forced to rip up an awful lot of paint.
Lesson 24: Don't let tape sit. Once the part is dry enough to handle, get the tape off
Her hair, tail, and her skin were airbrushed very simply. Her skin was actually airbrushed AFTER I hand painted it and decided I didn't like it. She shoes were also airbrushed. The wings were a weird mixture of airbrush paint (red) and acrylic to blend into the skin. It's hard to see, but I really tried hard with the blend and it actually looks really good in person.
I hand painted the purple because I didn't have a way to 'pearl-ize' the airbrish paint, but I did for the acrylics. It didn't even occur to me at the time that I could have used the acrylics in the airbrush. Anyways, the hand painting makes the skirt look a bit too 3D, which throws off the whole figure a little bit.
The eyes were simple and done easily (yay, another success). All in all, I'm happy but not thrilled with the results. I really wish I would have waited another month to do this one, to get more experience. As it is, the only real deficiency she has over the real deal, is that I have much less shading.
I found out that even getting the tape off fast won't fix the problem entirely, but it really really helped. But when you're going for perfection, little things like those chips being pulled up by the tape can double or triple the amount of time it takes to paint a figure. I truly hate it. Part of my problem as well was that I was using painters tape from my local hardware - the blue one, not the green one. Apparently, I was causing myself heartache for no good reason because as I only recently discovered, the Tamiya masking tape is PERFECT - it cuts easy, doesn't stick too much to the paint, but I've still never had a problem with paint leaking under it. Honestly, paint leaking under it is better than it sticking too hard and ripping up paint, so even if it does allow some to get under it, I really don’t care; I'm never going back to the hardware store tape.
Lesson 25: If Tamiya sells a version of it, the buy the Tamiya version!
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